Over the last four years, Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina have conducted Ziarah Utara (Pilgrimage to the North) every year in their city, Jakarta. Initiated together with the Australian artists and geographers Jorgen Doyle and Hannah Ekin, this annual walk aims to build trust and intimacy with people they encounter along the way, from informal settlements to gated communities, by way of visual documentation, trespassing, and listening to fading stories.

On a physical and sensorial level, Ahmett and Salina expose their bodies to nature afflicted by industrial contamination. Population growth and land conversions, coupled with massive human activity along the coastline, have resulted in ecological collapse, land subsidence, and rising sea levels in Jakarta, which now faces an uncertain future. This accumulation of sedimented problems becomes Ahmett and Salina’s “ground zero” to elaborate another side of the first capital in modern world history that plans to escape due to the climate crisis.

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Harvest from Atlantis follows the 7-month journey of mussel cultivation in Jakarta Bay. Amongst the littered and barren village, Tita Salina and Irwan Ahmett stage a ritualistic ceremony by parading and planting a monumental bamboo structure used for harvesting mussels out into the expanse of the sea. Over the months, petal offerings bless and foster the mussel tree's cultivation before finally yielding an abundant harvest and brought home. As household waste and heavy metals from industrial plants continue to contaminate the waters, groundwater extraction pose a huge problem as land subsidence and rising sea levels cause Jakarta to sink at an alarming pace. Amid ecological ruin under unchecked capitalism, these small coastal communities hold onto the sea as a site for collective living and striving as they have for generations. One day, even when submerged, the mussel trees of Jakarta-Atlantis will serve as monuments of resistance and regrowth from below ground.

Ahmett and Salina research on geopolitical turmoil in the Ring of Fire (or ‘Pacific Rim’), a region prone to natural disasters aggravated by other current climate crises. For the Biennale, the artist duo investigated the dynamics of climatic change over an extremely long timescale to a perspective from which it can be seen as occurring often. The project conjectured caves as archives of early human social life – and as indices of our species’ fluctuating fragility. Their contribution took two forms: a mini-symposium featuring experts in geology, primatology, prehistory and religions; and The Call of Fragility (2022). This was a multimedia installation merging documentation of a subterranean performance lecture with vocal sounds of the audience recorded in an interactive audio chamber.